The Red Review | Issue #29 (Feb 2026)
A Socialist Action Journal
We Cannot Back Down
by Bianca Mugyenyi
ICE agents have just killed another individual in cold blood in Minneapolis. A day after a general strike in the city sparked by ICE’s assassination of Renee Nicole Good, Trump’s goons have repeatedly shot another person. These killings reflect the growing danger of racist authoritarianism in the United States. This directly impacts Canadians. Around 100 Canadian citizens, including children, are reportedly in ICE detention. We’re seeing increased demonization of migrants in this country. Two weeks ago, the Canada First Movement organized “Stop Mass Immigration” rallies in Toronto and Ottawa. The protests called to “Start Mass deportations” and “Close our borders”. Right wing protesters have been calling to “Bring ICE to Canada”.
The British Labour Party and Lessons for Canada’s NDP
by Helen Smith
Since its electoral victory in July 2024, winning 411 seats out of 650 in the House of Commons, the British Labour Party has yielded many lessons. Millions of people, fed up with 14 years of austerity under 5 successive Tory prime ministers, voted for what they hoped would be an end to Tory rule. They voted for Labour’s promises to strengthen the economy, renationalize the railways, rebuild the National Health Service, and repeal the pensioners’ fuel allowance cuts. However, a serious look at the Labour 2024 campaign manifesto showed that the incoming government would be a Tony Blair-style Labour government. According to a recent YouGov poll after a year and a half in office, only 1 in 6 Britons view Prime Minister Starmer favourably. Even fewer have a positive opinion of the Chancellor of the Ex-Chequer.
Greenland and US Imperialist Extortion
by Gary Porter
Greenland’s Inuit history began with waves of migration from North America, featuring early cultures like the Saqqaq (c. 2500 BCE) and Dorset, culminating in the arrival of the ancestral Thule people around 1000 CE, the direct ancestors of today’s Greenlandic Inuit (Kalaallit). They mastered marine hunting and established traditions that continue despite Norse settlement and centuries of Danish colonization, focusing on deep connection to the Arctic environment for survival. Temporary Norse settlements led by Eric the Red arrived in in 982 CE, but faded away around 1500 CE. Greenland has a population of 57,000 in the southwest glacier free area. Of these 50,000 are Indigenous Inuit.
Imperialist Hands Off Venezuela
by Socialist Action
Stop the U.S. Assault and Canadian complicity. The naked U.S. counter-revolutionary offensive against Venezuela and Latin America will be repelled by global mass protests and by militant self-defence. The future is for the working class of the hemisphere to decide, free of foreign coercion. The answer to imperialist war and plunder is socialist revolution, commencing with demonstrations and labour strikes against the capitalist monsters. On December 16, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a “total and complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces struck targets in Venezuela and seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, transporting them to New York to face concocted drug charges.
Socialism & AI: Beyond the Threat to Labour
by Imogen Xavier
As socialists fundamentally striving for a society that does away with the need for surplus labour, automation can be a utopian prospect. This popular vision of so called “fully automated luxury communism” presents a scenario in which it is easy to envision generative AI as a useful and productive tool that erases white-collar administrative work. It is tempting then to see gen-AI as yet another technology ill-employed by capitalists, like smartphones and computers before. There are however important differences between these technologies on which grounds gen-AI as it exists today should be completely disallowed and disconnected from in the modern socialist movement. The reasons for prohibition of conventional gen-AI fall into economic, ethical, and philosophical categories.
The Province at War with Unions
by Isaac Peltz
François Legault and his government have launched the most anti-democratic, anti-union laws in modern Quebec history. He might not have been as ready to fight this battle as he claimed. When Premier François Legault said he was ready for war with Quebec’s unions, he may not have expected them to be as prepared as they were. During a cabinet shuffle this fall, Legault declared his intention to “modernize the union system.” The backlash was immediate across almost every sector in the province, prompting Labour Minister Jean Boulet to walk back the Premier’s remarks. Boulet’s words and his actions stood in stark contrast. Bill 3 and Law 14 (formerly Bill 89) are a historic regression on union rights since the Quiet Revolution.
Once Again Liberals Talk the Talk — but Where’s the Walk?
by Yves Engler
Mark Carney is a ‘lying Liberal’, not a defender of international law, let alone an anti-imperialist. The prime minister’s speech in Davos reflects a long Liberal tradition of seeking to convince people to ‘judge what I say, not what I do’. At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland yesterday Carney gave a speech challenging Donald Trump and defending sovereignty. He was widely lauded for explicitly criticizing the so-called international rules-based order. Liberal Canadian politicians are adept at rhetorical flourishes and too often liberal, even left-minded people buy their snake oil. But Carney has an actual record and except for a small positive shift towards China — driven by corporate Canada — that record is highly imperialistic.
Measuring Defiance in 2025: How Palestinian Sumud Challenged the Israeli War and the West’s Complicity
by Ramzy Baroud
“The year concludes with some somber numbers, but also much hope and the legendary sumud among ordinary Palestinians.” 2025 started and finished with two declared ceasefires in Gaza, both instantly and brutally shattered by Israel, operating with absolute, unquestioned impunity. The operational definition of a ceasefire, from an Israeli perspective, is a de facto one-sided campaign where the opposing party — be it the Palestinians or the Lebanese — is forcibly stripped of the right to fight back or defend itself. For Israel, its relentless war machine is always framed as an act of self-defense, even as the primary victims of these campaigns, as clearly evidenced by the two-year Gaza genocide, are women and children.